Achieving environmentally sustainable growing media for soilless plant cultivation systems – A review

Mineral and organic growing media have distinct community structure, stability and functionality in soilless culture systems

The choice of soilless growing medium for plant nutrition, growth and support is crucial for improving the eco-sustainability of the production in horticultural systems. As our current understanding of the functional microbial communities inhabiting this ecosystem is still limited, we examined the microbial community development of the two most important growing media (organic and mineral) used...

Green bean biofortification for Si through soilless cultivation: plant response and Si bioaccessibility in pods

Food plants biofortification for micronutrients is a tool for the nutritional value improvement of food. Soilless cultivation systems, with the optimal control of plant nutrition, represent a potential effective technique to increase the beneficial element content in plant tissues. Silicon (Si), which proper intake is recently recommended for its beneficial effects on bone health, presents good...

Growing Plants in Soilless Culture: Operational Conclusions

The previous chapters present various specific facets of soilless plant production, representing the state of the art and include some perspectives on the direction in which the field is moving. In some cases, gaps in knowledge were pointed out and required future research was suggested. Generally the chapters focus on particular facets of a system whose full complexity was beyond the scope of ...

Soil and Soilless Cultivation Influence on Nutrients and Heavy Metals Availability in Soil and Plant Uptake

Nowadays, most countries especially in arid and dry climate zones had experienced the water scarcity problems. In the agricultural sector, freshwater play a major role to supply water for the plant grows. Thus, the reuse of wastewater as alternative water resources in agricultural is highly recommended. However, wastewater is always contaminated despite after secondary treatment. Along benefici...

Towards environmentally sustainable health systems in Europe. A review of the evidence 2016